The Rasseness Story: Jaz's Family
by EyeKyu
Summary: The gentle Nagai race has long been attacked and enslaved by the monstrous Tof. Not long ago, on the distant Nagai colony of Nagaat, a typical attack went underway. Except this time a family of Nagai escaped. But escape is a long shot from survival. Please critique constructively as much as you can, thank you very much. Image by Daeshagoddess (look-up on DeviantArt) -Thank you.


The Rasseness Story:

Jaz's family.

Liad Neumann

_**Chapter III: The Game**_

The building is more technologically advanced than any she has ever seen in her home town. The walls made of smooth white matte material that seems impervious and impossible to stain, a stark contrast to the fragile and messy homes of bricks and wood back on her home planet. The lobby area is partly open to the outside of the strange world with the large entranceway and doors always left open to let the air in.

The air is frigid, unlike the warmness of her subtropical homeland, yet fresh and unpolluted, unlike the constantly recycled and foul-smelling environmental systems aboard the slave ship that stole her from her home and from which she just recently escaped. Waiting in the lobby, forced to sit idle, she finally has a moment to run through the events that had transpired over the last few weeks of her life. Weeks more eventful, turbulent and horrible than everything bad before it combined. She has been through so much fear, suffering, worrying and pain.

Finally, a strange humanoid creature steps out of the only interior door within the small building. The alien's blue-skin gleams in the bright lights emanating from the fixtures on the ceiling, the two distinct tail-like appendages that emerges from the back of her head seems to undulate as she turns from the door to the to the woman seating in quiet contemplation. The woman immediately snaps back to attention as the alien regards her.

"Sorry for the wait Miss, he will see you know." The blue twi'lek announces with a smile and then continues to sit down behind a counter where she returns to work on a console. The woman immediately stands up, clearly having had enough waiting, and marches to the door. As soon as she opens the door and she gets a feeling of what is inside, she instantly understands the situation in its entirety. The room is much darker than the lobby, while the lobby enjoys both the lighting of the ceiling-fixtures and of the natural light from the windows and open doorway, the office only has a small dim lantern on a table to illuminate the spacious room. The smell of nic-i-tane is slight yet it permeates the room and a barely audible recording of jizz music has just looped. Jaz immediately knows that she is entering a game. A game where both players know all the rules, written and unwritten, and how to bend and break them. The game of negotiation.

An hour, maybe two, has passed. The man opposite the table to Jaz runs his stubby fingers through what is left of the hair on his head, utterly destroying the combover that fooled no one. This is analogous to him throwing away whatever mask of charisma he has tried to wear up until now. Besides his unattractive mug and body the man just altogether lacks any charisma. But he knows the underworld and black market and street dealings better than anyone in this sector. He is a human in a Hutt's world, doing a Hutt's job, and yet he is still alive. The fact that his Hutt overlords have not disintegrated him was proof of his competence at the job. Slin has managed to run the entire planet and its criminal elements for over five years now, without any friction or problems arising from either the criminals, locals, and even authorities, little present as they are. The unique chemical make up of the planet's primary liquid yields a very cheaply-harvested and _effective_ snyth-spice. A resource that the Hutts would not dare ignore. With Slin running the show he turned a situation where thugs bullied the natives for the sought-after blocks of ice, into an odd symbiotic relationship where the gangsters and citizenry played-off each other to the benefit of both parties. And now, a strange woman who has just arrived planet-side, who looks like she just scratched her away out of the Kessel Mines, is approaching him requesting to borrow a large sum of credits.

"So... at _this_ juncture , I am afraid I hold _all_ the cards," Slin cocks one eyebrow ", interest rates will be high, but I will make them surprisingly reasonable. Considering that you are dealing with an _unofficial_ loan." Slin utters. Jaz holds her breath for a beat and lets out a sigh.

"We can discuss interest rates at a later time. The most important part of this... contract, is that my family never be harmed. That my family be left alone. This is all for naught if they are in danger or are threatened." At this, Slin taps his chin three times in mock contemplation. It is obvious to both parties what this means but then Slin finally says it aloud.

"That will escalate the fees." Jaz allows herself to let out a barely noticeable sigh of relief that her family will finally be safe. Albeit at a price, but at least the price was not metaphorical but rather in actual money, something she could deal with. It pops into her mind that in this slice of the universe the currency she was after are called Imperial Credits, which she would have to get closely acquainted with soon. After this clause is settled, the discussion only lasts for another half an hour. The sun by now is setting and the dim moon and shiny nearby planet are vying for attention in the blue night sky. The game of requests, demands and justifications is finally resolved. Both players walk away thinking themselves winners.

Jaz has settled her family with shelter, food, medical supplies, safety and most importantly freedom. Slin has settled himself and his Hutt masters with a juicy new source of income. After having one final supper with her family, Jaz leaves on her way to the planet's spaceport. The loan she took out from Slin was a big one and she needs to make big scores fast to pay it back. The agreement was solely based on that her family not be bothered, but the agreement also stipulates that Jaz pay back her loan. And Jaz would not allow herself to discover how bad this loan-shark can bite, not when her family is in the waters.

_**Chapter I: The Slaughter**_

"Dad! Dad!" was seemingly the only thing her mouth was able to vocalize as she ran through the scarred and burned remains of what was once her homely village. The carnage was still in progress. Giant, towering husks of muscle were still in the act of either crushing or shooting down the gentle and lean bodies of her friends, family, and neighbours. Every few seconds she saw a familiar face either in the midst of struggle or having already lost the struggle. Throughout the history of war with these monsters it is well known that they usually attacked to acquire slaves, but it was apparent that this time they were satisfied with just killing us for sport.

"Dad! They got Gorges. And the Nayris twins... What do we do?" She looked into the eyes of her loving father, eyes that try as they might, failed to hide a sense of hopelessness and surrender. However, upon seeing the desperate, pleading eyes of his eldest daughter, resolve miraculously came to him.

"Jaz! Listen to me. The militia and guard failed. We thought we'd be ready, we weren't. Our only-," he paused and repeated the last word for emphasis, "-only chance for survival is escape." He abruptly took a step away from the tense conversation to look through a nearby window. He grimaced and tried to hide the grisly scene he witnessed from his daughter. Outside their formerly lovely home one of the monsters grabbed a friendly face, perhaps a neighbour, and smashed it against the sidewalk curb. The result being a street side covered in red blood as the head no longer carried what could be described as a face. To avoid his daughter seeing or drawing attention, father restored the curtain. He tapped his chin thrice and continued, "Leoren says she's been working on a ship that can fly and can get us out of here."

"A ship!? A space ship?! We have one of those? I thought only the leaders got one." Jaz's jaw dropped at her father's claim.

"You know your sister, she wouldn't tease about those starships of hers. It's our only hope, those savages made debris of all the other ships in town. Now hurry up, go pack whatever you can." He held his daughter's face gently. "There is no pleasant way to say this, dearest, this is the last time we'll see home. We're leaving."

Carrying a heavy purse stuffed with various nonperishable foods and whatever sentimentalities Jaz could stuff in it, Jaz did her best to keep up with her father's long strides. They utilized every alley and side street they knew of. Her father did such a good job at avoiding exposing his daughter to the violence, that the only reminder of the reality were the occasional blaster shots and the accompanying screams. Father stopped in his tracks, allowing Jaz to catch up and removed a comlink from his suit pocket and whispered into it, after a quick exchange father turned to Jaz and informed her that her mother and siblings are already on the way to the cave that houses the ship and that they'll meet them halfway there. Eventually, they ran out of alleys and there only remained a long stretch of land between them and the mouth of the cave. Craning his neck around a building's edge her father saw a scene that made his heart sink. A small grouping of the monsters, the Tofs, had lined many of his coworkers against the wall of his place of business. The Tof commander was barking orders in a monstrous alien language and when none complied to his incomprehensible demands he gestured for his lackeys to open fire on the whole lot. Jaz's father wanted to do something, anything; he wanted to save all his friends, to stop this mass murder. But his daughter was behind him, thankfully out of sight of the scene he was seeing, and the rest of his family was waiting just over yonder. A grim realization came to him that this horrible scenario was also an opportunity, perhaps the only safe one, to traverse the open stretch of land. If he timed the sprint exactly when the firing started, then the Tofs would be too busy with their heinous task to spot them and the blaster fire would drown out their footsteps. He grabbed Jaz's hand and she gripped his tightly in return, he waited for the sound of shooting to start, and he ran.

Reunited, entering the mouth of the cave Jaz pulled in her siblings under each of her arms and gave them a tight but quick hug. Leoren then raced ahead and flipped a switch on a cave wall and a surge of electricity travelled through cords all around the cave and then in an instant the entire cave lit up. In the middle of the cave stood a ship whose clean shine and glean contrasted the grime and moss of the cave walls. The whole family, sans Leoren, stood in awe of the high technology at their avail. Leoren swiftly jogged to the ship's ramp and as if by reflex sunk into the cockpit and the pilot's seat and started the preflight procedures. After a few moments, the family has gathered themselves into the ship. As Leoren lifted off, a collective sigh of relief was released by the family.

As the cave was left behind, the view of the town entered the ship's viewport. It was horrific. Every street and alley now seemed to have been messily painted in red. Bodies dotted several intersections as the huge Tof charged at those unfortunate enough to still be alive. All it took was a single blaster shot and their misfortune was extinguished at the price of their lives. The few uniformed guards and militia who survived the initial strike were tied up and being carried off by the larger aggressors. The battle, if it could be called that, was over with us clearly on the losing side, the conquered. Then again, never has there been such a one-sided battle. It was no conflict; it was slaughter. After all the killing, it was amazing that they had managed to salvage any remaining Nagai to be slaves. Yet again they lined a few survivors against a wall on Nay Street, the same wall were Jaz's middle school graduation photo was taken. Two of the survivors resisted and attempted escape, their revolt was instantly shut down by the slave master's blaster pistol. Mother attempted to cover Anan's and Jaz's eyes but it was far too late, the exposure was done. The family sat in silence as Leoren worked in the cockpit and the ship ascended through the layers of the sky. When the ship entered space, the family made their greatest attempt at simultaneously not disturbing Leroen yet cramming into the cockpit to get a good view. She announced that she is plotting an actual hyperspace route for the first time in her life and that it will take some time. She was almost halfway finished when the whole ship seemed to shake, as if grabbed by a huge cosmic fist. The fist pulled mercilessly at the ship and Leroen tried to resist to no avail. All that she could do was slightly turn the ship around, to at the very least see the owners of this cosmic hand.

Her heart skipped a few beats when her brain realized the situation, one of the Tof's ships waited in orbit and has just engaged a tractor beam on her ship. She turned to her family and looked into an emotional mirror, her family's faces, faces of hopelessness and dread. It took no time at all for the tractor beam to pull the comparatively tiny ship into its cargo bay. The locks of the ramp were swiftly cut through, the only barrier between them and the inevitable evil of the Tof slavers. The ramp fell down with an boom that echoed and at the foot of it stood a line of Tofs, each pointing a menacing blaster rifle or pistol at Jaz's family. Before Jaz's family could react they unleashed a torrent of blue rings from their weapons that brought each of her family members down cold. As the blue ring engulfed Jaz completely, everything went dark. And her life stayed dark for a long time since then.

_**Chapter II: The Escape**_

The smell of the Tof slaver ship was the worst, the smell of writhing Nagai bodies, constantly sweating and in pain. Or perhaps it was the sights, the sight of the labouring Nagai with their face permanently etched with futile dread. All of the senses were assaulted aboard the Tof slave ship _The Superior. _The sound of the Nagai was that of unheeded pleading for mercy from the fresh and a moment's rest from the seniority of the slaves. All requests were unanswered and all resistance was crushed immediately.

All of a sudden a new sensation overtook all of the occupants of the ship. A sensation that was slightly reminiscent of when Leoren's ship was taken by the tractor beam into this behemoth. How long ago was it? Time was a luxury that the Nagai were not given here, neither was freedom, the Nagai had no luxuries aboard. Living this miserable existence was luxury enough, the Tof master's whip reminded them periodically. But now the ship shook a second time. If the Nagai _were _given the luxury time. now would be the end of a hard day's work, but it was only a short phase of rest so none would die of exhaustion or break from the strenuous labour. The ship shook a third time and Jaz's father found her sitting against a wall, gasping for air between drinks of water that a fellow slave shared with her.

"Jaz, one of our brothers who used to be a smuggler says that this shaking is like a ship under attack. His copilot says he bets it's pirates. Pirates are attacking!" He finished with smile, Jaz was unsure of how to respond to this, a pirate attack did not seem the like sort of thing that would elicit such a positive spin. "This is our chance! We can escape in the chaos!" He said far too loud for what would mean immediate execution if he were to be heard by any of their keepers. What he suggested was akin to suicide, after all, Jaz could not hide that for a moment she doubted her father's sanity. The look did not escape her father, who instantly attempted to recompose himself and spoke quickly to explain everything.

"Remember that dreadful time when Anan was taken from us?" Jaz nodded, grateful that he was shortly after returned unharmed, "well, he was sent to clean one of their escape pods. That genius brother of yours figured that the escape pods are built only to work with Tofs. And even if we did get into one of those pods as soon as we eject the pirates or Tofs would either shoot us of the sky- I mean space- or just take us in. Anan deduced that all of their ships are wired the same way. That slashes both the escape pods and their ships." Her father stopped to gasp for air and stopped speaking a mile a minute. He wanted to clearly outline his train of thought and reasoning, to show to his daughter that he was reasoning. To prove that he is still sane, to prove that he can still protect her and his family, that he can still be the father he was unable to be while in this slavery.

"Which only leaves Leoren's ship!" Jaz came to the conclusion with her father. Her father had attempted to regain his eldest daughter's trust, but the trust was never lost. She then realized that although his plan was likely to end in death, he was just the first to admit what all the slaves secretly and silently knew. That the slightest chance of escape was worth even the highest risk of death rather than living another moment in wretched slavery. She held both of her father's hands as they stood up to regroup with the rest of the family. Leoren was fixing up some non-Nagai slave's cybernetic arm that was acting up and Anan was watching his exhausted mother sleep. Within moments the family was deftly moving together as the riled-up body of slaves in this section of the slave ship was starting to take the opportunity of the pirate attack and squeeze whatever heroism, bravery and rebellion they had left in their thinned blood. The ones who were bold enough to take aggressive action against their Tof overseers were quickly dispatched by blaster shots. Jaz's family used the chaos of the small rebellion's takedown and the rest of the slaves' reciprocal response to slip out of sight into the hallways of the enemy ship.

Looking into the enormous cargo bay, the entire family's heart was beating as one. It was the stuff of miracles that they had gotten this far and were not caught at each intersection of the ship. Leoren spotted her ship from all the others almost immediately, her sleek baby seemingly untouched all this time compared to the rest, filthy Tof star-fighters and cruisers, that inhabited the bay. But the bay was not only inhabited by ships and craft, Tofs were also running to and fro, entering into ships and blasting off to enter the fray with the pirates. Jaz's dad gestured for complete silence and communicated with an improvised sign language that the plan is to stay low and get to Leoren's ship quickly and quietly. He kissed his trembling wife and gave the signal to go. As one the family ran, keeping their heads down. Quarter way there, half way there and then _bam_!

Everyone snapped their heads back and saw father on the ground with his leg cooked by a blaster bolt. He screamed in pain at first and then screamed a second time for his family to run. Jaz looked from her father's eyes that pleaded for them to go and then to the rest of her family. She knew that they had to go now or all would be lost. She grabbed both her mother's and Leoren's hands and forcefully dragged them towards the ship as cries of sorrow from her family were mixed with the battle cries of Tofs that shot her father. Jaz pushed her mother up the ship ramp, with Anan in tow holding his mother's hand, and Leoren fighting back tears while instinctively running to the pilot's seat. As Leoren lifted up the ramp for departure, Jaz caught one last glimpse of her father as he was being surrounded by Tof murderers and slavers.

Leoren's nimble ship quickly abandoned the bulky ship and garnered the attention of a few Tof who fired at it, but to no avail as Leoren punched in a few evasive manoeuvres. Entering the fray of battle between the Tofs and the pirates around _The Superior,_ Leoren started to calculate an astrogation for a hyperspace jump. Just as she was about the push the final button to get out of there, the ship was hit by a random quad laser cannon shot. The ship's minuscule shields did manage to absorb any forthcoming structural damage but that zapped them to oblivion. Now, no matter how she tried she could not make the jump to hyperspace.

"That hit jammed the hyperdrive! I'm gonna have to go back there and see what got messed. Someone sit here and push this button as soon as I give the word." Leroen looked to her mother, who was rocking back and forth, whispering her husband's name over and over again while hugging her youngest, Anan. It was up to Jaz then, and so she plopped herself down in front of what might as well have been an apothecaries' lab to her as Leoren ran off to the engine room. A few seconds passed and a bright harsh flash emitted from the back of the ship followed by a harsher scream. Leoren emerged out of the engine room clawing at her eyes, yelling for Jaz to push the button. Jaz slammed for the jump and the ship was thrown from real space and violently tumbled into hyperspace.

Leoren fell to the floor screaming, "I can't see! My eyes! I can't see! So karking bright! Make it stop!" There was no stopping the pain and the damage was irreversible, to unjam the hyperdrive Leoren has opened and looked into the very heart of the active hyperdrive. Her entire life she dreamed of seeing hyperspace from her own ship's viewport, now she can't see a thing.

Many hours passed since the ship entered hyperspace. Jaz, Leoren, Anan and their mother all sat together in one ravelled hug. Doing whatever little they could in the way of comforting and consoling each other after father's death and Leoren's blinding. Aside from the occasional sniffle, whimper and cry, the ship was silent as it raced through hyperspace. Eventually Leoren broke the silence, "I have no idea where we are going," everyone but mother, who was still distraught, turned to regard her. "I programmed the jump perfectly, but that hit and my less than elegent unjamming-" she gestured to her eyes and wore a pitiful smile. "Well, I have no idea where the final coordinates were adjusted or knocked to."

Anan unravelled from his mother's tight embrace and timidly spoke up, "Doesn't that mean we can slip into a black hole or end up in the middle of a star or something?!"

"Little bro, give me some credit!" Leoren turned to where she thought her brother speak from, "I programmed half of that drive my self. Don't worry, the protocols and failsafes will make sure when we revert to real space we'll be in vacuum, we'll make it. We made it this far." The sad silence returned. Slowly the crying did too, until Jaz spoke up.

"Leoren, a ship has to have a name, right?" Leoren nodded with slight confusion. "Let's name her then. How about... _Father's Freedom?"_ A smile grew on Leoren's face, the smile then infected Anan and finally returned to Jaz's face, mother was unmoved.

"That's nice." Then overtaken by exhaustion, stress and grief they finally all fell asleep.

_Father's Freedom_ exited hyperspace and tumbled back into real space. Momentum carried it toward a star system containing a yellow star orbited by two small planets, one a boiling fireball, the other a seemingly temperate blue marble dotted with green with its two poles covered in deep white ice. Leoren sitting at the pilot's chair, even while blind managing to almost completely independently program the ship to land. As the ship was about to break atmosphere, the ship's coms indicator beeped. Jaz composed herself and answered the call, "Hello, this is Slin, operator of this planet. Welcome to Gloren II, would you kindly land your strange ship at the pad at these coordinates and we'll process you."


End file.
